Good News: This Shopping App Finally Makes the Mall Obsolete

Spring

There was a time, not all that long ago, when the best way for brands to get discovered was to open up a shop in the mall. At the mall, brands got all the creative freedom of a standalone store with 10 or even 20 times the foot traffic.

Then e-commerce came along, America’s malls became graveyards, and suddenly, brands had to eke out a reputation for themselves. So they took to Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook, armed with sunny product shots and clever come-ons.

But unlike the mall, none of these platforms let shoppers actually buy what they see. Instead, they have to visit the brand’s own website, an especially clunky process on mobile. It’s the digital equivalent of telling mall shoppers to drive to a store up the road to actually buy stuff. The risk that they’re going to get lost, distracted, or even lazy before they get there is pretty high. Would-be impulse buyers turn into wistful window shoppers, and brands miss out on millions of dollars in sales.

That’s why Spring is introducing a new kind of e-commerce app, hoping to bring the mall to the mobile phone.

The difference is that shoppers can actually buy those products—without leaving the app.

Founded by former TechStars New York managing director David Tisch, his brother Alan Tisch, Ara Katz, and Octavian Costache, Spring emerged from stealth mode today to reveal an app that looks like a shoppable Instagram. Shoppers sign up, follow brands they like, and see a steady feed of product shots. The difference is that shoppers can actually buy those products—without leaving the app.

Founders, from left to right: David Tisch, Alan Tisch, Ara Katz, and Octavian Costache. Spring

What’s more, unlike some other mobile commerce apps like Keep or Wanelo that rely on user-submitted content, every item on Spring is uploaded by the brands themselves, meaning they control how the products are presented, inventory, warehousing, and shipping. Spring doesn’t touch a thing. But what makes Spring’s offering truly novel is that the app has no shopping cart. To buy an item, shoppers simply choose their size, swipe right, and the order is complete.

Total Brand Control

It’s one of those remarkably simple ideas that is also remarkably difficult to pull off. With its sleek and pretty app, Spring is simultaneously solving a variety of problems that have dogged retailers as they try to find their footing in the rapidly growing world of mobile commerce. For starters, Spring’s swipe-to-buy concept is about as frictionless as it gets.

Retailers perpetually struggle with so-called “shopping cart attrition,” the phenomenon of shoppers abandoning their online shopping carts before buying anything. Spring bypasses that step altogether with its one-swipe checkout, drastically minimizing the amount of time shoppers take to consider a purchase. “Why create a workflow for shoppers to check out when in reality, they just want that one product?” Tisch says.

Spring also gives brands total control of the customer experience. On mobile, the only way for brands to achieve that today is to create their own app, but shoppers aren’t quite used to filling their phones with single-brand apps. The alternative, then, is to sell through a major retailer, like Bloomingdale’s, which has higher app traction. The problem is that lowers the brand’s margins, and in the end, Bloomingdale’s, not the brand, gets control of the customer. On Spring, however, brands not only get to choose how their products are displayed, but they also get access to all the data about their customers and can communicate directly with them through push notifications and other alerts.

Tisch says he learned how important that is to brands by watching his wife Zara build her own fashion brand. Her company, Zara Terez, has nearly 95,000 followers on Instagram, and yet, whenever those followers find a product they like, they have always had to go to a third party retailer to buy it. “My wife wouldn’t capture a) the margin, and b) the customer,” he says. “That’s the real key.”

The Swipe That Took a Year

But this simple idea turned out to be tremendously tough to execute. Spring’s team of 12 full-time engineers spent a year figuring out how to integrate brands’ existing payment and logistics systems into one front end. The goal was to allow brands to use their own systems to push products to Spring, so the company integrated with e-commerce services like Shopify and Magento to make onboarding brands easier.

Spring

“We built this robust technology so that in the swipe of a finger, we can make sure the inventory’s there and that the order gets processed through the brand’s system, such that when you call their customer service, they already understand exactly what the order is,” Tisch says.

Compared to the technological challenges, Tisch says convincing brands to sell on Spring was simple. Some large ones, including the French luxury goods company LVMH, even contributed to Spring’s $7.5 million round of funding. Now, Spring has 100 brands on board, from Levi’s to Carolina Herrera, and plans to launch more every day this month 1.

Each time a brand makes a sale, Spring takes what Tisch describes as a “minimal” cut. If brands offer free shipping, that fee is cut in half. Spring is also working with brands to design exclusive product lines. “It’s incentivized for brands to do stuff that’s pro-consumer,” he says. “Free shipping is great for consumers, so we cut our transaction fee to get them to do that.”

Why Spend Money on Instagram Ads?

Spring encourages shoppers to share items on other platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, but some experts say Spring could pose a threat to those very sites. In an effort to start generating revenue, Instagram and Pinterest are courting brands to advertise on their platforms. And yet, posts on Spring are effectively the same as Instagram ads and Promoted Pins with the added benefit that shoppers can instantly and seamlessly buy what they see. Why spend money advertising on Instagram when you can make money on Spring?

“You don’t ever really know the value of a mobile ad,” says David Bell, a marketing professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “On Spring, you have someone right at the end of the funnel, which is where you want to get with advertising anyway, but you’re never sure if they get there.”

Of course, the big difference with Spring and those other platforms is that Spring doesn’t yet have the critical mass of customers, and achieving that critical mass is the challenge still ahead for the Spring team. Even Tisch admits, “Anywhere you can buy something is theoretically a competitor for us.”

Still, it’s not hard to see how Spring, with its dangerously appealing product shots and all-too-easy checkout, could begin to steal market share not only from other e-commerce platforms, but from social media platforms as well. “Spring is for when you have five minutes, and you want to fill it with shopping, not social. It’s for impulse buying, discovery, and inspiration. You’ll see pictures like you would on Pinterest or Instagram,” Tisch says, “but on Spring, you can buy them.”

1. Correction 9:41 EST 08/14/2014 An earlier version of this story noted that J.Crew and Nike products are currently available on Spring. While Spring is working with both brands, they were not available on the app at launch.